Without an About page, you’re nobody. It’s not only one of the first places new visitors will head if they like what you’re serving up on your blog, it’s also your calling card. The problem is, most About pages are about as enticing as putting your hand into an alligator’s mouth. In fact, to be fair, at least that would have an element of excitement, which is more than can be said for your garden variety About page.

So how do you make your About page worth visiting? Luckily, there’s a ten step program for that (twelve is so 1995). In this 101 post we’ll focus on getting the basics right with five things to keep in mind when carving out an introduction to yourself and your blog that doesn’t scream “nothing to see here, move along.”

1. Know what you want to do with it. Your blog or site exists for a purpose. If you don’t know what that is, and don’t set about making it abundantly clear, your chances of having people stick around to read your content are on the fast track to nowheresville. Imagine you were running a roadside BBQ emporium. If the sign for said emporium had pictures of yoga poses, moustaches, kittens, and hotdogs on it, you’d probably be failing to connect with your potential audience.

Your About page is that sign. It’s your chance to inspire them into action. Know what it is you want to inspire them to do. Do you want people to get in touch? To realize that you’re an expert in fossilized monkey dung? To hire you? To follow your blog? To seek you out on Facebook? To laugh until they pee? Have a goal, and everything else falls into place.

Action time! Set a timer for 90 seconds. In that 90 seconds, jot down 1-3 things you’d like your audience to feel, think, and most importantly of all, do, when they read your About page.

2. Meal vs. shopping list. A shopping list and a delicious meal have a lot in common (okay, ingredients), but they’re not the same thing. Imagine a hungry friend comes over for dinner. But instead of serving them your signature dish, you read them a list of ingredients. “Pasta” you say. “Cheese” you say. “Tomatoes” you say. Half an hour in, they start to cry.

That’s exactly what most About pages feel like. “I come from blah blah” you say. “I like dogs” you say. “My best friend Winnie thinks it’s cute when I blow my nose trumpet” you say. But none of it holds together. It’s a shopping list. Your job is to put those parts together and make them into something greater than their sum. Tell us a story, connect the dots: “Living in the mountains of Switzerland as a teenage shepherd, I learnt the art of playing the nose trumpet to communicate with the first of my many canine friends, Winnie. My love of dogs, mountains and nose trumpeteering has continued to this day, only now I play nose jazz in Seattle while Winnie’s son Mr Ruffles dances a doggy tarantella. For cold hard cash.”

Action time! Get that timer out again. Give yourself 60 seconds this time, because you like living on the edge. Scribble down, at breakneck pace, any words that spring to mind to describe you (“book nerd,” “cat fancier,” “walrus trainer”). Take another sixty seconds and do the same for your blog (“hilarity fiesta,” “doom machine,” “cat photos”). Take on one more bout of sixty second scribbing, because, hey, what’s three minutes between friends, and do the same for important events in your life (“dog bite,” “cheese aversion,” “psychokinetic prom fire”). Now you have all of your ingredients on the page, give yourself 90 decadent seconds to draw lines between all of the above and see how you can connect them all into something greater than the sum of their parts.

3. Front load it. The first sentence of a good About page is there to get the reader to the second sentence. The second sentence’s job is to get them to the third sentence. If people aren’t getting to the fourth sentence without letting out a gut-wrenching yawn, you’re probably veering off course from your goal. Which is to make people do something. The right people. Your people. The others you don’t mind. They don’t belong here. “Get off my land!” you might say to them. But the people you’re addressing, the ones you hope will stick around? Make sure you’re reeling them in from sentence one.

Action Time! Imagine for a moment that you’re one of those poor deflated looking people on the street trying to get strangers to take fliers from you. Only, instead of fliers, you’ve got your blog. You have half a second to get their attention. What are you going to say in that half a second to make them stop in their tracks? Set a timer for, say, two minutes. Jot down as many opening lines as you can come up with.

4.Elevator pitch. Nobody’s saying you need to boil your About page down into haiku-like super-brevity, but it IS a good idea to have a short, scannable, one-liner version of it to complement the fuller-bodied story of you. Think of this as your way to get a foot in the door of your reader’s rapidly dwindling attention. How can you boil down everything you’ve said in your bio to a single, inviting, enticing soundbite you can use to reel them in?

Action Time! The timer’s off for this one, because being concise is challenge enough. Try to capture the essence of your About page in a single sentence, like the tagline for a movie.

5. For realsies. When we sit down and write it’s very easy to slip into English Class 101 pretentious writing mode. You break out your best adjectives. You toss around flowery verbs. Before you know it, you have the most stilted, unnatural chunk of snooze-text you’ve ever seen. Write your About page as if you telling this to a friend over coffee, beer, or a less stimulating but no less refreshing beverage of your choice.

Action Time! If you really want to put it to the test, go and do that — pitch your About page to a friend. Rehearse. And tell them about your blog. If you see them wincing, you probably need to rewrite your About page so that feels more natural and down to earth. Bonus points if you try this on a stranger at a bus stop.

Hopefully that gives you a little something to shake up your About page. Coming up, in About Page 201: The Meat Grinder, we return like champions to a feast to make minced meat of the most important page of your blog, and ratchet that beast up several more mixed-metaphor notches to excellence.

Until then, link up your own About pages (or those that have inspired you) in the comments and show us how it’s done. Or if you’re hungry for more ways to personalize your site without alienating your audience, check out our earlier post on three ways to make your blog your own.

84 Comments

Comments

Last post (theme) talked about serving friends cheesecake, this one mentions pasta, cheese and minced meat. Then beer! I’m gonna need to revamp my current “About” page into a Weight Watcher’s testimonial! Seriously, thanks for the meat and potatoes article and people call my About page “quirky” or “offbeat.” But I’m thinking it could get called worse. Like “overweight” and “having high cholesterol!”

This was an informative and entertaining post about About Pages that presented creative advice in a way that is easier to visualize and to try out, probably the best post on About Pages that I have read so far, thank you Michelle W. 🙂

At the end of your post you mentioned linking our About Pages or About Pages that inspired us in the comments, and so here is my terrible little About Page in its current unimproved form 😀 😉 :

Great post! I’ve rewritten my About page a few times now. I think it might need another look based on the above! Plus, I think it’s too long. I’ve recently added a mini About Me to the sidebar, which I think helps. Any thoughts or comments are welcome!
Do you know what my blog is about from reading the About page? Would you stick around?
Thanks a million!http://www.myfoododyssey.com/about/

Though not a blogging expert by any stretch, I did feel that your “About Me” section help me understand your blog more quickly than the “About” page itself. I noticed that (like me) the focus of your blog has changed and evolved as you continue to write – I think you have a really interesting angle and a shorter, more targeted “About” page would help to showcase that more. Hope this helps!

Thanks for that feedback! The mini About Me was written during this blogging “course” after we’d been asked to really think about the focus of our blog, so I guess it makes sense that that one more closely captures where my blog is currently at. I do feel the “full” about me needs a further tidy up. Cheers!

“English 101” words work great if your intended audience likes that kind of thing. One writer’s “stilted, unnatural snooze-text” is another’s normal. Some people really talk like that with their friends. It’s called “being educated.”

Similarly, one writer’s “realisies” will seem dumbed down to another.

Writers and audiences are not one-size-fits-all. One’s choice of words should match the blog.

Word choice should always reflect the personality and style of the blogger, to be sure, hence “Write your About page as if you telling this to a friend over coffee.” Use all the big words you want — lord knows I do — but not if you’re forcing it.

A really useful post – thank you so much! My about page has always been something I’ve done as quickly as possible and not thought about since. But now I shall make it a little more welcoming with these really good steps.

It reads quite well, Janey. You know what the blog is about from reading it. I would suggest that the first paragraph could be condensed slightly as, to the brand new reader, it’s hard to see where it’s going and you have about 3 seconds to hook people in. Once I got to the end of that paragraph I was hooked, but I nearly didn’t make it! Hope that helps!

My own blog and current interests & focus have no similarities whatsoever to your blog (although I do like travelling)… but based on your About Me, I’m hooked and I’m following! Sounds incredibly fascinating and I’m looking forward to reading more 🙂

I always think about about pages. To me they’re like profiles and people should read them to find out what’s going on with the blog and the author. You never know, you may have stumbled upon a crazy. I also warn people with about pages what I’m writing because not everyone likes what you like writing about.

Michelle, I really liked your post on how to write the “About” page. Especially English 101 and the ten steps.
Thank you so very much for that.
Kindest regards,
Mike Kerasotes
April 19th 2014 Saturday Morning
mkerasotes.wordpress.com
pingback, comment

It boggles my mind that some people don’t even have an about page. When I first visit someone’s blog that’s what I look for, It sets the tone for the blog and you know what you’re getting into. Little Miss Menopause – for instance after reading her FAQ page I immediately followed.

I guess I’m still unconvinced about the importance of a good “about” page. I personally don’t tend to set much store by them; there are several blogs I follow that I’ve not even been to their “about” page for. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I”m just not convinced people actually read them that much.
I know mine needs work, but I’m not really sure where I want it to go. I don’t want to give out a mass of details of my personal life, but that’s what I’ve always considered the “about” page is for, right?
I hate selling stuff, even if it’s “me”. In fact, especially if it’s “me”; too much fear of rejection. I actually speak in erudite. And I’m hopeless at ye olde “Elevator Pitch”.
All of which this post is basically saying will put people off. Arrgh. Is it really that important? Do I have to?

Mine ranks about halfway in my statistics. There are several posts that have had more views than my About page, but then, I’ve only been at this a little under 2 months. If the consensus is that other people really look at it, I’d better do something more realistic.http://ghwordforge.wordpress.com/about/ is the current version. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

It’s actually not automated, no. I don’t seem to have a submission from you, so let me know which challenge you’re doing and I’ll get you set up. In the meantime, all the assignments are available right here, so get cracking 🙂

Yes ma’am! Since I’m still new to the blogging world I’ll sign up for the 101 class. I think I forgot to actually submit the submission, but I would love to be a part of this Blogging U (college away from college).

Rakhi, I think this is matter of personal preferences. I, for one, always love landing ‘where the action is’ and then digging deeper into the ‘whats’ and ‘abouts’ when I feel like it. I like to think of the landing page as a calling card.

Thank you for that reminder! I’d whittled down my About page when this post came out originally. Reading this today, I managed to streamline it even more. Maybe when you re-publish this again, I’ll finally manage to say it all in one short paragraph 🙂

My About page even makes me want to head for the hills. Yikes! I just don’t know how to get it to work!
However, this post is really helpful. Hopefully I will have something less obnoxious on that page one day (soon?).http://dresslikeshailene.wordpress.com/about/

It looks good to me, so I am asking myself if I am missing something: What makes you want “to head for the hills”? The only – very minute – issue is the size and/or position of the picture – why not experiment with that a bit? After all, your blog is about style and looks, isn’t it? But this is only my 2 cents…

Stopping by from Blogging 201. The title interested me, so I hope you don’t mind. I created an about Murder Blog page, and I love it! I do have a question, though. I put this new page as the parent page to About me… Why doesn’t it show up at the top of the blog? How will people know it’s there? Here’s the link… crimewriterblog.com

Michelle , I wrote to you earlier as I saw 101 blogging on my stat but I registered for 201 and just did my first post. I know I am late. Can you plwase update the stat which I believed was automatically loaded for me? Thanks heaps.